ECON-AD 213J | Class 9 Reflection: Mzansi

Olea sits on a bench on Robben Island.

Robson, Joey, and I on a ferry to Robben Island.

Nmonde's saxophonist, who can play any song by request.

Nmonde was the host of our dinner last night. Her yellow top and head wrap matched the bright smile on her face as she greeted us. “I could have expanded the restaurant to hold 200 guests,” she explains. “But if I did, then I wouldn’t get the chance to personally get to know all of you during this very special evening.” I had the most delicious dinner at Mzansi. I had Malva pudding again, this time with a very bright yellow sauce whose ingredients I did not dare to inquire about.

Unlike yesterday afternoon’s philosophical struggle in the Khayelitsha township, our dinner in Mzansi, thankfully, gave me a chance to engage with the local culture. Ace, Nmonde’s husband, is a hearty fellow who wore a red polo shirt with a Ferrari logo emblazoned on the left breast, a khaki-colorer cap, and a smile that wrinkled the sides of his cheeks into a dimple. At the end of the dinner, he invited all of us to play instruments. He gave me a simple percussion instrument, a bottle filled with dried beans inside, to shake in rhythm with the other dinner guests playing music. Afterwards, we walked back into the restaurant hall to learn some dance moves with him. Arms flung in all directions and hooked onto strangers as we spun in all directions. There’s something special about marimba music that is festive for the sake of festivity. The majority of music that the youth listen to these days are either laced with emotional irony or mindless thumping. The music they played that night was triumphant and unafraid, and apt to come from South Africa considering its difficult history of the apartheid.

Edgar Pieterse’s lecture on African Urban Economies today is my favorite so far. He describes how economic models of development are “terminally broken”, and how all data must be viewed with circumspection. Economists are eager to claim that Africa is soon to mimic the Asian industrial miracles, but the empirics indicate otherwise. This is because the rapid urbanization does not reflect industrializing economies but rather rural populations escaping secular droughts and dropping commodity prices. The agenda, Prof. Pieterse proposes, is access. Access to low-carbon, resource-efficient, socially-inclusive, and spatially-cohesive resources are necessary for the next wave of urbanization.